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You're being ADSL

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:12

While ADSL in the US seems to be standard fare, in good old Blighty we're taking it a bit more slowly. And we're right to be wary, says Steve Cassidy

We at PC Pro have a habit of being ahead of the game: it's nearly a year since enterprise covered the delivery of ADSL, in the form of a trial in north London. However, since it's a BT project, it's not too surprising that we're a year or more down the track and not much has hit the streets so far. I've heard of hotels in the US with ADSL connections in their rooms, and here we variously are still waiting. Many techie types in the US have taken up AOL accounts, because there's a special deal in which AOL provides a DSL connection. Even allowing for that US tendency to jump into every new telecoms standard the instant it comes out (and then to live with the consequences), there's still a sense of frustration building up in the UK. After all, ADSL is quicker, isn't it? Why can't we have it now? Surely this is the nirvana of Internet access we've all been waiting for?

Actually I don't think so, and I'm going to explain why. Simple network logic, which we're all familiar with on a day-to-day basis, plus the simple maths behind Web business reveal that ADSL isn't going to lead us to the promised land (even if the story does include an honourable mention for some Israelis, some north London reminiscences and the business consequences of heart bypass surgery).

ADSL in the UK is being sold as two services: the home connection and the business version. www.btopenworld.com tells the whole story in a heady mixture of technical detail and marketing fluff. There are numbers to make any serious fiddler salivate, 512Kbits/sec minimum from the pipeline, with tons of 'local content' and tie-ups with big-name data sources. Wow, sounds really cool. Except that the pipeline is very closely regulated when it reaches your end. You get the approved BTopenworld modem and some 'enhancements' to your local setup to help you 'make better use of the range of services'. If that wording sounds familiar and disturbing, so it should.

Ten or so years ago I was riding on the London Underground and recall seeing those curved cardboard adverts with a little cartoon devil on them for several months before I met Cliff Stanford. At that time he ran an Apricot dealer and software house, and I well remember a late-night visit to Demon Systems to look at a very new 9,600 baud modem. That's where I finally put two and two together: beneath that advert was a big cardboard box full of the silly security 'Qi' that Apricot was putting out as its integrated security solution of the time.

Cliff had a fair bit of spare kit hanging around, and an idea - he started Demon via a conference on Cix and his 'tenner a month' flat-rate charging model set the world stage for widespread consumer Internet access, eventually persuading even mighty IBM to make an exception in its UK pricing. Cliff's attitude, and that of the techies who gathered around him from Cix, was open, permissive and flexible. He had the foresight to reserve a large chunk of static IP addresses, and if you were rich or clever enough to put a bunch of users through that connection that was fine by him.

This was truly radical stuff and in many ways still is, as it's taken more than a decade for the marketing men and their product differentiation to take over from Cliff's pricing model, and BT's ADSL deployment is a case in point. Cliff made his money from Demon out of two small facts. First, it takes a lot of activity by a single person using a modem to fill up an Internet connection, and second, the amount of traffic you generate governs how much you'll be charged by the bigger service providers (the ones that won't talk to end users, but will talk to ISPs). This balancing act between the traffic coming in from you and me as we surf away, and the steady load 'upstream' to the rest of the world, is where an ISP sinks or swims, and there are two basic ways to perform it: using the network hardware to govern the traffic, and keeping as much material as possible local so they can run cheap storage hardware in preference to expensive pipelines.